Horse/Power

by MAURA KELLY

Editors’ note: This essay includes descriptions of suicide and violence.

Maybe only a fool takes a pile of manure personally. But it was hard not to read into it, considering the way that the horse responsible—my charge—left one for me every morning. I’d appear to feed him only to have him get between me and his barn, turn tail, and drop a small avalanche of fertilizer in my face. Then he’d promptly disappear around back. I’d moved to the middle of nowhere to care for this dumb beast, and this was the welcome I got.

Admittedly, the horse might be excused for feeling sulky. He hadn’t had an easy time of it in the run-up to my arrival. His former caretakers had abruptly abandoned him the winter before. His owners then boarded him a few miles away—but at the stable, he kicked the other horses if they crowded him at mealtime; before long, he was expelled. Next his owners asked their young landscaper to tend horse as well as lawn, but the kid neglected the creature instead, leaving him regularly covered in burrs and so underfed that his bones began to show.

I’m a sucker for the orphaned and overlooked of the world. I had every intention of doing right by this horse. As I saw it, we had a lot in common, both of us on our own, trying to survive without much assistance. But his open disdain for me made it hard to be nice.

I’d been living across the dirt road from him for two weeks when, on the phone with his seventy-eight-year-old owner, Shary, I mentioned his rather pointed bowel movements. Could he be using them as a form of protest? I asked.

Shary laughed. “He’s a horse with strong opinions,” she said.

Yeah, well, I had strong opinions too. And if he wasn’t going to like me, then fine. I’d dislike him right back.

Before I became the caretaker for a bourbon-haired stallion, I had no experience with horses. I had no special interest in them either. What I had was a problem—no place to live—which had grown out of another, much bigger problem.

In wry moods while still in New York, I thought of the big problem as a “failure to thrive.” On the phone with friends in California or Boston, I’d try to be funny about it, saying I was having a “minor nervous breakdown.” Mostly, though, I wasn’t laughing.

A sleep disorder: That’s the term I would’ve given it if a physician had asked me to make up one. I could no longer sleep long enough or well enough to feel refreshed, not since the suicide of my best friend years ago—a hallucinogenic trip gone terribly wrong. I got over my guilt, but I never got back to sleeping through the night. I tried everything my doctor suggested and then some—melatonin, acupuncture, antidepressants; quitting caffeine; attempting meditation; and so on. But nothing helped much, and the relentless exhaustion was corrosive. I was so worn out I was always breaking down sobbing in public places—on the subway, in line at Trader Joe’s, even in the middle of a hushed West Village book reading, where a friend rushed me out as if to a waiting ambulance.

But there was no ambulance for me.

I would’ve gone into rehab, but for what?

Other people would tell me they were tired too, like they understood. But their tiredness didn’t prevent them from living their lives—from holding down jobs while writing books while getting married and having children and going on vacation. My tiredness changed everything. It stopped me from traveling; from working nine-to-five like I’d once done; from holding up my end of my romantic relationships—in part because I hated to spend the night with anyone, since that guaranteed I’d sleep even worse. Everything was so exhausting that I did nothing anymore.

Anyone trapped so long in that state—crawling through the days, spending half the night awake—would dream about escape. Involuntarily, I imagined getting there by way of disembowelment. I’ve never had a samurai fetish. But that image, of stabbing myself in the stomach with a sword, I couldn’t shake.

“Suicidal fantasies”: That phrase was common enough that, when I was younger, I assumed that the Sylvia Plaths and Kurt Cobains of the world were sort of in love with the idea, like being in love with someone who doesn’t treat you right. But “fantasy” seems like a misnomer. I myself was terrified, at least, by the scene that kept forcing itself on me, incessantly, like a flasher flashing at me an image of my own flesh.

New York City, once so full of possibility for me, became saturated with despair. All I saw anymore was that vision of my own death—until, one cold night as I walked loops around Brooklyn’s Fort Green Park, a new idea overpowered the obsessive image: What if suicide represented a failure of logic, or at least problem-solving? Killing myself would be a reasonable solution only if I didn’t want my life. But wasn’t the problem actually that I wanted life to be better? Different, not over. Wasn’t changing my existence, even drastically, worth a shot before I tried dying? So I exited not my person but my place.

A British friend suggested I camp out free for a while in an ailing farmhouse that he’d inherited—a dilapidated 1770s five-bedroom that was sitting empty while he tried to make up his mind to sell it. As a freelance writer, single with no kids, I was portable; I took him up. I sublet my beloved rent-controlled Brooklyn apartment for a month—plenty of time, I figured, to recharge and make headway on a novel I’d outlined—and drove up to the decaying Hudson Valley home, ninety minutes north of Manhattan.

There, I knew no one. I worried about making it through four weeks so alone—although in the end, I stayed and stayed. I wasn’t sleeping better there. But I didn’t have to pay rent and withdrawing from the world meant I wasn’t constantly reminded that everyone else in the world was better (more energetic, successful, cheerful) than I was.

My second year there had just begun when—one crisp fall morning when I felt my novel was nearly finished, and possibly even very good—I got a call from my only sibling. She had something to tell me about our father—an Irish immigrant and construction worker who’d raised us after my mother’s death when I was eight, my sister nine. He was dead. He’d killed himself.

People always said how much my father and I were alike. And he’d had sleep problems too, for decades, since the time of my mother’s diagnosis. Even so, suicide was the last thing I expected of that tough man, who’d talked constantly about reuniting with my mother in heaven; who as a practicing Catholic, would’ve believed that suicides aren’t allowed into heaven.

We’d had a tough relationship, but I also loved him more than anyone else, before or since. He’d been the gravitational center of my psychological universe for as long as I’d been aware of myself as a self. With his death, a new trap door clapped open beneath my feet. I fell further into the void.

I threw away the novel I’d nearly finished. My British friend put his house on the market. That deteriorating colonial was by then my only foundation in life—even if termites had gotten to the porches, which began to list. When the place sold, I had three months to find someplace new. But I’d stopped freelancing—and the magazine industry, which I’d worked in my entire adult life, was floundering. I couldn’t just snap my fingers and make rent money again.

I posted ads on craigslist near and far—from Maine to North Carolina, and every state in between—describing myself as a writer looking for a (free) place in the woods, happy to care for animals. I figured I might end up with an outside cat, a few chickens, maybe a tribe of goats. What I got was an email about an eleven-hundred-pound stallion.

By the time Shary spotted my ad in the “Situations Wanted” section of the Poconos craigslist, she was desperate to solve her horse problem—having by then dealt with the sudden departure of the former caretakers, the expulsion from horse boarding school, and the landscaper’s neglect. She was willing to take a chance on someone with no experience, as long as that someone was willing to live with her very large pet full-time.

This creature, sixteen hands tall, was a Kentucky Mountain Saddle Horse—a breed known for its beautiful gait. A horse with a thick white stripe down his head. A horse who supposedly thought he was a dog. A horse named after my favorite musician.

Dylan lived on his owners’ unfussy but stunning vacation property, two hundred woolly acres south of The Adirondacks—surrounded by eight thousand acres of state forest.

When Shary typed that out numerically in an email—8000—I thought she must’ve added an extra zero by mistake; that she must’ve meant eight hundred. But no: Eight thousand it was. 6,060 football fields’ worth of trees. And her land was cut through with creeks and walking trails; it even had an old bluestone quarry up the hill. Sounded worth seeing. And so, on a sunny morning in late September, I drove three hours farther away from all I knew, to meet Dylan and his humans.

After turning off the highway and driving for twenty minutes—passing a few mobile homes, a bombed-out barn with a fleet of rusting school buses around it, one long wonderfully overgrown meadow—I went four miles down a dirt road with nothing but thick forest on either side. Then I passed a hunting lodge, turned around a bend, and coasted into an Edenic valley.

The trees glowed. The goldenrod lolled. The creeks spoke excitedly. I may have seen a bald eagle that very day; I saw them many times afterwards. The old barns ahead of me were a cheerful red, the white fences along the horse’s paddock bright white.

The odds that I wouldn’t much like Shary and her lawyer-husband Gary (rhyming names, really), I’d put at decent. To have a horse and that much land, they were probably pretty rich, and maybe they’d be condescending or treat me like their help. But as it was, I loved them. Septuagenarians, amateur naturalists, kind people, they’d purchased their land fifty years earlier and let it be both wild and beautiful. Down-to-earth, sensible, modest, they kept me at ease and laughing through the afternoon.

Dylan seemed all right too. With Shary and Gary, at least, he was playful. He tried his best to stick his nose into the coffee mug Gary took outside; then he stretched his neck around Gary’s shoulders, bringing his chin down on Gary’s chest, to demand a scratch. When Shary came out with a bag of carrots, he nosed her elbow to demand some. With me, though, he was shy and retreating. Shary, noticing my frown, assured me he’d come around once he got to know me.

The gig was mine if I wanted it.

Surely, I’d be OK for a while there in their wonderscape, swaying with Queen Anne’s lace and tansies. And yet I hesitated. In my naivete, what gave me pause wasn’t the massive sentient beast who’d be left in my care but the immensity of my isolation there. Eighty minutes from the nearest airport; forty-five minutes from the Greyhound station; twenty-one minutes from the nearest grocery store or gas pump or anything—with no cell phone reception that whole way. A good five hours, at least, from my nearest friends, in Brooklyn, none of whom owned a car. In a place where every lawn was broken by a Trump sign.

But I had nowhere else to go.

So I went.

It’s not like the isolation wasn’t a problem. But it was a problem of absence, at least. The horse was a different story—an eleven-hundred-pound problem of presence.

After I moved in, Dylan went from aloof with me to actively hostile. The manure bombs were bad enough. Also the haughty way he’d stalk off after taking the bribes I’d offer him, slices of fruit, leaving me to stare stupidly after him. The way he still wouldn’t let me touch him, hurrying away from my outstretched hand like a snooty kid.

The real blow, however, came one morning late that fall.

I’d just cleaned out his barn, using a shovel to move his softball-sized deposits into a large garbage pail. I’d pulled the heavy thing out through his gate and reached the manure tiller before I realized I’d forgotten the crucial thing: to close his fence behind me.

I spun around to find Dylan, way back in his field, suddenly looking from his gaping fence to me. He seemed to smile—delighted, I swear, that I’d been so stupid.

I tried to stay calm. He was sixteen, after all; middle-aged, in horse years. Lazy. I’d never seen him move faster than a trot. And he was also way, way, way back there by the mountain, too. Surely I could beat him to the gate.

I ran for it—and he shot forward like a Triple Crown winner at the starting gun—and with my next breath he was out, free, wild, unhinged, racing past me. Only when he hit the dead center of the road—as far from me there as he’d been back in the field—did he stop on a dime, to stare at the massive freight truck roaring down the mountain, heading straight for him. He was hypnotized.

These trucks, from an active bluestone quarry way somewhere up the mountain, sped past regularly, shaking the universe as they did. A state inspector told me that the quarry had to be flouting a two-ton weight limit, given some damage to a new bridge. The trucks usually carried a single massive boulder—but this monster one had two strapped to its flatbed.

No way two tons of speed and then some could stop in time to avoid killing Dylan.

The driver was honking wildly.

Dylan remained paralyzed.

The life that passed before me was my own. I’d be kicked out in disgrace. I’d have nowhere to go. I’d never live down yet another death.

As I dropped to my knees screaming, Dylan sprang out of the way—and the trucker blared past, still honking.

Dylan, now on the other side of the road from me, flew into the expanse of trees behind my house—and kept going. The sound of him trampling through the underbrush died away before the truck horn did. He vanished into the eight thousand acres encompassing us.

Hours passed with no sign of him. I called the vet’s office, the plumber, the farrier—but no one could help. I wasn’t ready to admit to Shary that I’d failed her, not yet. But as evening came, it seemed I’d have to.

I sunk into an old picnic table, feeling like a character out of a Maupassant story. Special breed horses—what did they cost? Whatever it was would be more than I had. I’d spend the rest of my pathetic life trying to pay back Shary and Gary.

I was about to press send on Shary’s number when a noise in the trees made me look up.

At the top of the slope behind my kitchen stood halter-less Dylan, triumphant as a conqueror. He breezed down to the road, glided across, and stopped just outside his gate to graze. I sidled up to him—and he’d run off his wildness enough that he let me grab his mane. But when I tried to yank him towards his paddock, he merely shook me loose, shaking free a few of my fingernails in the process.

In one crucial respect a horse will never be a dog: He’s not going anywhere he doesn’t want to go, not when he weighs eleven hundred pounds. Even if he’d been wearing a halter, and I’d had a lead on it, I wouldn’t have been able to jerk him into that barn if he didn’t agree to go.

He gave in only after the farrier suggested I get a box of Domino sugar cubes I had inside. I gave Dylan one and let him know there were more—and he was literally eating out of my hand as he walked through his gate. Once I had him locked in, I informed him I despised him and collapsed onto the picnic table. Supine, I called an older wiser friend, crying.

“Why did he do this to me? It’s like he hates me.”

“But Maura,” she exclaimed, “he didn’t do anything to you. He’s just being a horse.”

In those simple words I heard a strange profundity. The blue sky extended endlessly, above the trees. The stars at night there were extraordinary—you could see every infinite glittering one.

This horse was just being a horse. And yet I’d read into his disobedience a meaningful judgement of my worth—a sign not only that he hated me but that I somehow deserved to be hated.

“You give away your power,” a therapist once told me.

Fucking therapists. They either sit there, nodding, telling you to “say more,” or they make a bunch of grandiose pronouncements, the vast majority of which are totally useless. They’re like astrologists with the wrong charts.

But even a broken clock gets the time right now and then. And to be fair, that one guy was better than most. I did give people too much power to judge me, at least if they were intelligent, successful men on whom I had a crush. I cared too much what they thought, or what I imagined they thought. If they rejected me, I disintegrated. My sense of worth folded in on me so easily.

Any of the many shrinks I’ve seen could tell you the problem echoed the tough relationship I’d had with my father. After my mother’s death cast him into a darkness that he never quite found his way through, he both neglected and bullied me. He regularly flew into violent rages, touched off by the least little thing. I learned as an adolescent, for instance, not to ask how his day had been; that seemingly harmless commonplace would get him scowling. He’d bellow about how I didn’t really care, often literally backing me into the corner by our fridge while he ranted about his stresses, like I was to blame for all of them.

On rare occasions, he shoved me. A couple of times he kicked me after I’d fallen down. When he slapped me across the face once, the world stopped, cracking into before and after, before the glinting silver bells around my head began to ring. But what may have been hardest about our clashes was nothing that he did but something he’d refuse to do, for days and even weeks afterwards (months, when I left home). While I still lived under his roof, he’d refuse to so much as look at me, ignoring me for so long that now, whenever I think some man is ignoring me, I have a panic attack. Being ghosted resurrects his ghost.

And now this horse—this massive hulking being, so much bigger than I was, who scared me, who refused to speak—was resurrecting it. This horse was rejecting me, and I was just letting it happen. I’d become helpless all over again. I’d given away my power to a beast.

Some people with violent parents respond by becoming violent adults. Others accumulate professional capital or fame or simply wealth as a means of buffering themselves from ever being diminished again. Some take a slant view of power, which is what I’ve done—actively avoiding relationships, jobs, pursuits that would give me dominance over another person. (As a writer, I hand myself over to be criticized, but I don’t edit other people’s work.) To me, power smacks of injustice.

With the horse, however, I’d have to take control of the situation, like it or not. Another Rumspringa in the woods would not do—my nerves wouldn’t survive it, and maybe the horse wouldn’t survive it either. So I asked Google, How you do you get a horse to obey you?

The best answer I found was, Get him to bond with you.

Horses, like many animals, build trust with each other through grooming. Swatting away a mate’s flies or massaging her with your teeth: These are kindnesses. Humans can approximate such behavior by brushing—and even an uncooperative horse will let you brush him a little if you sneak it in while he’s eating. 

The next morning, I endured the latest manure bomb, filled Dylan’s grain bucket, and hung around till he gave in and started to eat, despite my unwanted presence in his barn. After he had a few mouthfuls, I grabbed his curry comb off its hook, walked over to him, and pulled the serrated grooves down his neck.

His ears went up—surprised, possibly suspicious. I pulled the thing down his shoulder again before trying his side. He submitted to another a minute or two before he swished off.

The next day, I tried again. Again, he didn’t seem to enjoy it so much as wonder what the hell I was doing. Nonetheless, he stuck around a little longer that time—and longer still the next day—till eventually he stopped greeting me with excrement and began coming to the fence to meet me instead. He’d reach his neck over to say hello; I’d offer him my hand, and he’d touch it with his soft nose. Or, if he happened to be way back in his paddock grazing when I opened his gate, he’d look up, finish whatever he was chewing, and bolt forward, thundering at me with terrifying delightful speed.

The more we got to know each other, the more affectionate he became. Sometimes in the mornings, I’d walk into his paddock only to have him rub his muzzle up and down my arm so hard that I’d turn to grab the fence for balance—at which point he’d start rubbing up and down my back, rubbing me so hard that I’d be both laughing and shouting, slightly worried that he’d crack one of my ribs in his enthusiasm. In the evenings, if I was standing opposite him while he had dinner, babbling sweet nothings at him while he ate, he’d finish his mouthful and reach over the low barrier of his stall to nuzzle my neck, nibble on my hair, and huff in my ear, all of it fantastically ticklish and wildly endearing. I swear he knew how much I loved that, considering the dopey grins he’d give me. Like something out of a folk tale, a simple repetitive labor had transformed a sulky brute into a loyal creature—and turned me from a powerless kid, a beggar wanting help, to the one with something to give.

If I’d heard before that horses are exceptional readers of human emotions, I didn’t appreciate it till early winter. Temperatures were forecast to drop into the twenties. Time to get Dylan into his jacket, or rug. A new task for me, but since Dylan and I were now buddies, I assumed he’d go along with anything I asked.

That afternoon, I dragged the cumbersome horse quilt out to where Dylan was nibbling the dwindling grass. Then I attempted, like a toreador with a cape, to swing it over him—but he only danced out of reach, like we were playing a game.

Ha, ha, very funny, but OK now Dylan, this thing is heavy: I readjusted my grip and tried again—and once more he slipped away.

Over and over, we repeated this routine till my arms ached and my patience snapped. It was cold, it was getting late, and if this big dummy wanted to get pneumonia, well, to hell with him then: I stamped my foot, threw down the heavy thing, and turned on my heel—and went maybe two steps before a startled Dylan was at my side, working his nose into my hand—requesting forgiveness. He’d read my wordless temper tantrum, and so accurately. I apologized profusely, stroking him while I did—and when I lifted the rug again, he let me ease it on.

I never lost my temper with him again.

Dylan loved mischief. He’d make anything into a game, like he’d done with the rug. One of his favorite ways to play was by racing me whenever I jogged past his front fence.

He’d be standing in his barn, storing up some end-of-day sun, when he’d notice me running down my driveway. He’d blast out to where I was and pivot to run parallel to me on his side of the pickets. We’d be neck and neck for approximately two seconds before he’d pull ahead, beating me to the end of his massive fenced-in area by a mile—where he’d turn to look back as if to ask me what was taking so long. He had a real sense of humor, that stallion.

“Bud!” I’d call out to him, laughing. “Sorry! But I’m not a horse!”

He knew a lot of things, but I wasn’t sure he knew that.

Months with Dylan became a year became two. I called him Bud so much that at some point one of the landscapers—all sinewy muscles, this skinny guy, a sweetheart—asked me, “How old is Bud?” and I had to explain that wasn’t actually his name. Sometimes the crew would crowd around Dylan at the end of the day, trying to pet him, but he’d jog away for a better view of me. (Often I’d go out to tell the head guy something Shary wanted me to pass on, or just to say hello.) One time when that happened, the biggest of the men called over to me.

“He doesn’t care about us! All he wants to know is where you are.”

That may have been true, and yet sometimes with me he’d jerk into these strange fits of pique that genuinely made me fear for my life. Usually they happened if he and I were towards the back of his main paddock, near where the mown grass opened to a brushy area. I’d wander over to the wilder growth, trying for a better look at some crimson cardinal or red-winged blackbird, or hoping to identify some plant—when Dylan would race over, rear onto his hind legs, and circle around me, too close, belligerent, like a boxer trying to intimidate another in the ring. He weighed close to ten times what I did, and up on his hind legs like that, he was a giant—at least twice my height. If he came down on me, I’d be crushed like an eggshell.

I’d scream at him in pure terror, asking what he was doing, begging him to stop. But I could never talk him out of those fits—which would end as suddenly as they began. In a snap, he’d drop down gently and go right back to grazing, transformed once again, this time back from demonically possessed into the good ol’ bud I knew.

I’d stand there trying to catch my breath, literally clutching my heart and staring at him, suddenly so peaceful again. What had just happened? Why did it keep happening? Once my pulse quieted down, I’d creep over and offer him a shaky hand—and he’d touch it with his nose like he always did, as if nothing was wrong, nothing had passed between us, like he hadn’t just threatened to kill me. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t suss out what I did to bring on those unnerving bursts of aggression. I actually wondered if he could have a brain tumor or something, since those flashes read almost like psychosis—he’d seem so not himself, and then come out of it instantaneously, seemingly with no memory of what he’d just done, or of whatever I’d done to make him so furious.

I finally figured it out only because YouTube had figured me out. I clicked on one of the endless horse videos it would tempt me with, a clip of two beautiful horses, one white and one chestnut brown—up on their hind legs, circling each other. As the title explained, that’s how horses play.

It’s funny now to remember my reaction to something Gary said, that day when I first met all of them. Gazing at Dylan, he said, “Beautiful animal, isn’t he?” And I thought, That bloated barrel on four sticks? I couldn’t see it.

But after a while, I began to catch glimpses of it. Like in the spring, if I went out one last time before bed and he was standing behind his barn, under the moon, ears up, listening to some sound from another galaxy, his cream-colored mask of a face aglow—my demoiselle d’Avignon. Or in the summer, if I’d spot him moving rhythmically through a massive patch of shoulder-high goldenrod, brown as wheat; he’d become a bronze sea dragon, riding the waves. When autumn was back again, he’d graze in the distance with the red maples and sugar maples and silver maples lighting up the mountain behind him; and beneath his black mane his coat, against that backdrop of reds and golds, would give off an ember glow. And then after a snowstorm, he’d kick up his heels, exuberant as a puppy, bucking around till every flake in the field had been overturned.

During the three years when I lived in The Realm of the Horse, as I often thought of it, I had visitors on eight weekends. I left the property only for two short summer trips of four or five days, and for two or three at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sleep was still such a problem that I dreaded spending the night away from my own controlled bedroom.

All those years, Dylan kept me sane.

I never returned to the novel I’d been writing when my father killed himself. I wrote five others up there with Dylan, only to throw them away too. The sixth, my agent thought we could sell, with more work. Which meant, according to an agreement I’d made with myself, the time had come to push myself to return to the “real world.” I didn’t want to, especially. I didn’t feel a bit strong. But I knew being so cut off from other people wasn’t good. I’d also have to find a way to earn a living again, and the longer I put it off, the harder it would be.

At the same time, the thought of leaving my dearest bud was crushing.

When I finally managed to tell Shary, I was choking back tears. “But I can’t stay here forever just for Dylan,” I said. “Right?”

We found a friend of a friend to replace me, a poet named Quinn who’d volunteered with rescue horses. My bud would be OK. Still, I cried every day of my last month with him—and on my final day, when I tried to leave after lunch, I just couldn’t do it. For hours, I trailed around behind him in his paddock as he poked at the grass; now and then when I caught up to him, he lifted his nose to touch my hand with it. I stared at him as he stared at a couple of deer passing through, with the usual intense frozen fascination that came over him whenever these kindred animals showed up. I followed him into his lean-to and talked to him while he had some hay. I refilled his feeder. At dinnertime, I gave him some grain in the open part of his barn, where I’d learned to hang his bucket, because he preferred being out there where he could keep an eye on everything. I jabbered to him while he chewed—and one of his wild rabbit friends appeared to stand below Dylan and eat all the pellets he dropped.

I told him that I was going away, but that someone even better was going to take my place, and he’d be OK—although it pained me that he couldn’t understand, to think that he might feel abandoned by me in the brief interval before Quinn arrived, or maybe even after.

The sky flushed pink and swelled to purple. I gave him one last scratch. Then I drove off, with violet ribbons of sky behind his barn behind him in the mirror.

Shortly after I moved away, I found my way to a top-notch psychiatrist in Boston, who put me on a drug cocktail that has saved my life in slow motion. But my horse helped me get to a place where I could be saved. He led me through the underworld I was in to the other side.

The other night, I dreamed of a horse who was and wasn’t my horse, like all dream-things are and aren’t what they seem. This dream horse lived outside my childhood home—the same house where my father killed himself. In the dream, I hurried over to apologize for abandoning him—and he was so excited to see me that he jumped on top of me, knocking me down and crushing me under his weight.

I lay there convinced he’d ruined me for life.

Love can do that—like my father’s love for my mother, and mine for him.

But in the dream, I thought: Maybe I’m not completely powerless.

I tried to stand up—and I was fine. Good. Whole.

I jumped around to show my horse, and found he’d become a handsome man.

We lived happily ever after.

But no: I live alone these days, without my beloved horse, even if now I can see friends without driving five hours to do it. Still, there was magic out there, in his realm—a place where a beaten person could befriend a beast and begin to feel less beaten. That goes some way towards explaining why I still have dreams—and in them, my horse.